Phrasal Names in Polish: A+N, N+A and N+N Units

Abstract

This chapter discusses multi-word expressions in Polish which consist of a noun accompanied by an adjective (in any order), e.g. bo˙za krówka (lit. God.A cow.DIM) ‘ladybird’ and dział finansowy (lit. department financial) ‘financial department’, as well as those in which a head noun is followed by another noun in the genitive case, as in prawo pracy (lit. law.NOM work.GEN) ‘labour law’. Such units are phrasal lexemes, that is, expressions which contain fully inflected constituents but resemble derivatives in having a naming function. Their syntactic fixedness, semantic compositionality and their interaction with word-formation is discussed. Although some phrasal nouns are not (fully) compositional semantically, the majority of such multi-word units need not be treated as idioms. Phrasal schemas function both as redundancy statements with respect to lexicalized multi-word units, as well as templates for creating novel phrasal nouns in Polish. Construction Grammar and Construction Morphology provide an adequate grammatical model for a proper account of these phrasal nouns.